1. Field of Invention
The invention pertains to a heat dissipating device used in an electronic device for taking heat away from a hot element therein (such as the CPU in a computer system). In particular, it relates to a heat dissipating device that can take away heat from several heat-generating elements.
2. Related Art
In a computer system, the central processing unit (CPU) is in charge of data processing and generates heat during operations. If its temperature is too high, the heat may damage the CPU. Therefore, a heat sink is usually installed on the CPU in the computer system. A fan is further installed on top of or on one side of the heat sink. Therefore, the heat produced by the working CPU is passed to the heat sink and then taken away by the air blown in by the fan. This means can lower the working temperature of the CPU, maintaining the normal operations.
With the increase of multi-tasking demands, the computer system requires a more powerful operational ability. A more powerful CPU is thus needed to process complicated data. In addition to the increasing operational frequency, some manufacturers even propose computer systems with double CPU's. The double-CPU system uses two CPU's to process different tasks. The heat dissipation design for the double-CPU system is still the same as that of the single-CPU ones. Each processor is independently installed with a heat sink and a fan. Since the two CPU's in the double-CPU system perform their jobs according to system requests, sometimes only one CPU is running while the other is idle. Even if both of them are running at the same time, they may produce different amounts of heat due to the different operations. In such cases, the idle CPU also has an idle heat sink or the CPU running less diligently has a lower temperature. Therefore, the corresponding heat sink does not reach its maximal efficiency.